Expert Tips

1. Blog.
One of the best marketing strategies for a small business is blogging. By providing your prospects and clients with informative, non-salesy content that you can house on your blog, promote socially and offer to other networks to supplement their strategy, you and your team can quickly establish yourselves as experts in a desired field. It can also positively impact your SEO.

By blogging at least twice a week, you significantly increase your website’s ability to be found on search engines. The more you blog, the more traffic your site will get from Google, Yahoo and Bing… [because] you are adding fresh content to your site [assuming your blog resides on your company website and if each of your blog posts includes a call to action, you might even generate some leads from your blog. Business owners and managers should also consider guest blogging.

Guest blogging is one of the best marketing tools by contributing to relevant blogs with useful content, you can expand your reach and show off your knowledge. Moreover you can typically link to your website via your author bio, making it easy for people to visit your site.

2. Leverage social media.
If your small business isn’t using social media, it’s time to start. Social media produces almost double the marketing leads of trade shows, telemarketing or direct mail. Because social media can be (or seem) overwhelming choose one social media platform that your customers, prospects, and industry leaders engage with the most be it Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Google+ and start building a presence there.

Once you’ve set up an account, start connecting sharing your original content, joining discussions and engaging with the community. Keep your social efforts frequent, but above all, relevant and helpful to your audience.

3. Create a Facebook business page and use Facebook advertising.
Facebook is one of the most important marketing tools for any business to use, especially a small business.
People spend one out of every seven minutes on social media, providing a huge opportunity for small business owners to build a relationship with fans by sharing relevant content and interacting by commenting and liking fan’s comments.

The more a user interacts with a page, the more likely their friends are to see it, increasing awareness.
Also consider Facebook advertising. The ads appear right in the news feed so it’s really impossible to miss. It is especially effective with local clients, because there is virtually no waste as with traditional media.

4. Post to Pinterest and Instagram.
If you are selling a highly visual product or service, say you are in the bridal or food business, you should be regularly posting images on Pinterest and/or Instagram. Posting is free and both platforms have large followings, particularly among women. You can drive major traffic to your website via Pinterest, and no platform uses hashtags to build audiences like Instagram.

For goods and services specifically targeting women ages 18 to 65, [we] recommend companies utilize Pinterest. Since women are inherently more visual than men when it comes to shopping online it’s not just a cliché a picture really does speak 1000 words.

5. Leverage email marketing and email reminders.
Email marketing is great for engaging customers, but you’re really limiting its potential if you keep it in a silos o be sure to integrate your email marketing campaigns with your other marketing campaigns for maximum impact, and vice versa.
For example if you’re running a Facebook contest, increase the number of people participating by notifying your email subscriber list of engaged customers. If you’re running a time-limited deal or special offer, send a reminder via email.

6. Try PPC (Pay-per-Click) advertising/Google AdWords.
SMBs need to be as targeted with their marketing efforts and dollars as possible, especially if their product/service is location specific — and PPC ads are one way to do so. PPC ads can be a cost efficient way to dip your toe into the online marketing world and use your marketing dollars to specifically target the regions and terms that relate most to your business.

Some media/marketing companies even offer automated bidding solutions that allow the SMB PPC novice to gain the same level of targeting and exposure without the heavy lifting.

An efficient Google AdWords campaign, where you are sure you know how the platform works, can be a huge quarry of leads for small businesses. Start with targeted keywords, paying close attention to keyword match types, negative keywords and search query results to eliminate irrelevant visitors, like people looking for jobs.

Then, enable some form of conversion tracking so you know that new visitors are scoping out your business and not immediately bouncing, scaling up the spend is the easy part. Making sure you aren’t wasting money on irrelevant clicks is where the biggest AdWords challenge lies.

7. Conduct webinars.
Use webinars to build your list and generate leads. Webcast experts say some webinars see a 70 percent rebound effect comprising those who viewed the live broadcast as well as new individuals. Webinars are also more interactive and keep the attention of leads or potential clients.
Just make sure your webinar is content rich, with relevant content (that is content relevant to the target audience), well organized and hosted by someone with experience conducting or running a webinar.

8. Don’t forget about press releases.
Competition for visibility is intense, press releases help small and mid-sized businesses amplify their content across hundreds of global and local channels, allowing them to achieve the same exposure as much larger brands.
By including press releases as part of an integrated marketing strategy, small businesses are able to get their content directly in front of consumers and connect with journalists and bloggers interactions that can result in lasting impressions.

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